


I Will Rain

by Prismatic Bell (Nina_Dances_In_Technicolor)



Series: Open Up (And Be Your Parachute) [1]
Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Blood, Carlos Backstory, Cecil Is a Good Boyfriend, Cecil is Human, Cecil is a sympathetic little creeper, Cecil seriously does not understand outside prejudices like at all ever, Fluff, Freaked Out Carlos, Identity Issues, M/M, Sleepovers, Telepathy, Trans Male Character, let me show you them, my Cecil headcanons, no really guys it's a little yicky, warning: may cause diabetes, well kinda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-05
Updated: 2013-10-05
Packaged: 2017-12-28 11:29:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/991514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nina_Dances_In_Technicolor/pseuds/Prismatic%20Bell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos thinks he's the one who has the surprise he's not too keen to talk about. Cecil thinks none of this is a big deal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Will Rain

**Author's Note:**

> And when the world gets sharp and tries to cut you down to size  
> And makes you feel like giving in  
> Oh, I will stay, I will rain, I will wash the words and pain away  
> And I will chase away the way we push, the way we pull  
> You're beautiful  
>    
>  _\--"Parachute," Train_  
>   
> 
> _  
> _  
> _Thanks to my lovely betas Connor, Lydia, and Nytie!___
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> __  
> _  
> _A side note: this particular Cecil is human (or at least, not noticeably inhuman) with some extrahuman powers. One of those powers is being "visionfluid," or appearing different to everyone who sees him based on their perceptions of who he is. A large majority of the town sees him as the blonde-white-tattooed Cecil most of fandom gravitates to, but unlike pretty much everybody in town, Carlos sees him exactly as Cecil sees himself when he looks in the bathroom mirror. It's worth noting so people with other headcanons don't later go "bwah?" that Cecil in this fic does not self-identify as white.__
> 
>  
> 
>  

His thighs are wet.

 

His thighs are wet and the bed he’s trying to sit up in is too big and far, far too soft to be his own, and his back is pressed up against a wall and _oh god why now it’s been almost six months couldn’t you have waited one more day_ \--

 

Cecil rolls over next to him and stares up, eyes dozy and sleep-hazed. “‘s goin’ on?”

 

“Nothing, I just have to, um, you know, I just need to--” But Carlos is a lousy liar, and his tongue tangles over what should be a nice, easy sentence. Cecil blinks a couple of times, and then his eyes open wide.

 

“Oh,” he says, and then he swings his legs neatly off the bed--and _how_ does he do that, Carlos feels like he’s being swallowed alive back here--and offers Carlos a hand to tug him out of the nest of oversized pillows. “I didn’t know if you used pads or tampons so I got both, they’re behind the hand towels under the sink.”

 

Carlos darts gratefully into the bathroom--braving out the night with toilet paper stuffed in his boxers is not his idea of a good time--and paws out the box of tampons in the moonlight from Cecil's bathroom window, pausing to shake his head. He hasn’t needed them in half a year--and a good thing, too, a purchase like that in Night Vale would raise too many questions he doesn’t want to answer--but that doesn’t change what he wishes he didn’t have a reason to know about the box in his hands. Leave it to Cecil to pick the most expensive thing on the shelf like it’s not going to be thrown out in six hours.

 

The night wasn't supposed to be this kind of disaster; they started it with Cecil commandeering Carlos’ popcorn maker and popping enough popcorn for them to fill their bellies with enough left over to throw at the screen and each other while some terrible movie played in the background. There was kissing on the sofa while they finished the last of Cecil’s leftover Chinese takeout (which Carlos is pretty sure wasn’t actually made with chicken, but he’s always been a little afraid to ask), and a wheat-and-byproducts-free cheesecake Cecil adapted from some old cookbook that actually turned out really well, and then all the lights went out.

 

Cecil found them three candles and a flashlight, and Carlos was about to suggest he should head home for the night shortly (most guys he’s dated would take the opportunity to say something smart about mood lighting, and Cecil isn’t most guys he’s dated, but that doesn’t mean he’s not thinking it) when Cecil pointed to a dog across the street running from something that looks like swamp ooze but moves like mist. Then the mist touched the dog.

 

And after what happened to the dog, Carlos didn’t feel so much like leaving anymore.

 

He might still have survived the night--Cecil offered him nightclothes and suggested his bed was big enough for two without having to lie all over each other, and what Cecil lacks in verbal tact he more than makes up for in the physical kind and in general kindness--but he’s obviously pissed off one of the numberless and mostly-unnamed Night Vale gods, maybe by eating graham crackers out of a care package last month before he realized they were made with wheat, and now-- _ugh_.

  
  


He’s halfway through cleaning up when Cecil knocks on the door and then sticks in a single arm with a pair of pajama bottoms in his hand. “Thought you might need these. Just throw your other stuff in the hamper.”

 

“Yeah, thanks--” And then Carlos is really all the way awake instead of halfway faking it, and suddenly all the questions come like chickens to the roost. So he rinses out his underwear and does the best he can with the borrowed pajama bottoms, and then slides into the fresh ones, bracing for the most awkward conversation since he came out to his parents. Suddenly he’s absurdly grateful Cecil doesn’t sleep naked.

 

He tosses the bottoms in the hamper and shuffles back to the bedroom, where Cecil is looking out the window.

 

“My daisies are still there,” Cecil reports happily. "And I can see Mrs. Donovan's herb box. Whatever it was, it doesn’t affect plants.” He turns his head, reaches out that single hand again to help Carlos back into the man-eating bed (and he should stop thinking like that, thoughts like that have the potential to leave Cecil waking up in the bed tomorrow alone . . . assuming he’s not planning to already). He gives Carlos a funny look, and that’s the best Carlos can do: a “funny look.” It’s almost puzzled, but not quite, and there’s none of the terrible, carefully-sculpted neutrality Carlos has gotten so used to from friends, family, coworkers who haven’t yet figured out the elephant in the room will vanish if they can just wrap their heads around a man with a vagina.

 

“Are you okay?”

 

“You bought me tampons,” Carlos manages, and now it’s a puzzled look, now Cecil is genuinely confused.

 

“Yeah?” And then the look breaks open. “Oh. _Oh._ Well--I was going to say something a couple of months ago, but I figured you’d already figured it out, and I try not to use it really, it’s so _rude_ \--but when you think about something so much it’s like trying to ignore a ninety-foot-tall blinking neon sign, you know?” Cecil stretches, arms up over his head, and Carlos hears his spine crackle. “I’ve got telepathy.” He says it, Carlos thinks, the same way someone might confess to astigmatism, like they’re discussing some normal, not particularly serious defect and not something people have been trying to prove or disprove for hundreds of years. “I mean, I use it for _work_ , but kibitzing on City Council meetings is kind of different, if I had to attend and then write copy and then record tapes I’d never go home--”

 

“You knew I was--” Carlos bites his tongue. But sooner or later he’s got to say it, so--”born female.”

 

Cecil gives him a puzzled look again. “You mean you actually _changed_?”

 

Carlos stares at him and wonders if it’s normal for women in Night Vale to have stubble and he’s just missed it. Cecil intercepts the look and stares back.

 

“Okay, so, I mean most of what I got was bright red and exclamation points--people don’t actually think the way they think they do, you know, it’s not all neat and sentences and words like it is in municipally-approved books, it's actually more like a lot of visual gibberish, but you sort of learn to translate it--and a lot of the words I got I’ve never actually heard before, but I thought you were born male and your outsides didn’t match.”

 

“Yeah . . . yeah,” Carlos agrees, and seriously, he’s having this conversation at three in the morning in his boyfriend’s bed, in his boyfriend’s tee-shirt and pajama bottoms because some black mist that kind of looked like tar decided it was going to envelop the town and the two of them saw a stray dog start spewing blood before it was swallowed whole, somewhere along the line something about this should start making sense. “That’s, um. That’s what trans means. I have a hysterectomy set for my sabbatical, but I haven't been through any surgeries yet and even with hormones sometimes--”

 

He makes a terrible face, and when he does Cecil’s mouth falls open and he dives for the nightstand.

 

“I thought you might want this,” he says, and tips two brown pills--plain old ibuprofen, god bless america and the Advil company--into Carlos’ hand. “Dana’s always got problems during hers. You can tell, she's got this somebody-kill-me _look_ she always gets--You don’t throw up, do you? Because I can get a bowl or put you on the outside or something--”

 

Carlos shakes his head. “I used to. When I was a teenager.” He swallows the ibuprofen, and then stares back at Cecil. “It doesn’t weird you out?”

 

“Hey, there are people in this town who think I’m white,” Cecil retorts. “Even ones who know who my dad was. I learned a long time ago you’ll get a better idea who someone is by asking them instead of going off what they look like. Unless you’re in a bar at one in the morning and they’re asking if you want to go home with a neurosurgeon. And even that tells you a lot, I guess.”

 

Carlos raises his eyebrows. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

 

Cecil folds the blanket primly over Carlos’ legs. “If you’re going to lie to me about your career, I don’t feel bad peeking to see just how much bullshit it is,” he answers. "I didn't with you, though. I never had a reason not to trust you." He offers up a grin that reminds Carlos of a little boy who broke his mother's cookie jar. "You're just _really_ good at obsessing over stuff when you should be enjoying yourself." He reaches out, threads their fingers together. "I guess it's a pretty big deal outside, huh?"

 

Carlos stares at him. Cecil can't be serious--but he's flopping back onto the mattress, already shoving pillows around the way he wants them. Cecil tugs on Carlos' hand, pulls him back into the blankets. "Come on, it's cold out here. The mist’s probably what knocked out the power."

 

Carlos worms under the blankets up to his shoulders. Cecil twists and stretches like a kitten. “I love you,” he says, and it occurs to him it might actually be the first time he’s said it, but that’s okay, because it was so unplanned it came out sounding normal and natural like he’s a human being with actual social skills instead of stuttered and terrible, like he’d pretty much resigned himself to. Cecil’s smile is bright in the light from the window.

 

“I love you too, beautiful Carlos,” he says, and when he puts his arms around Carlos’ waist this time Carlos doesn’t stop him.

 

“Beautiful, but not perfect, huh?” One of these days he’s going to pull out a thesaurus and see if he can match Cecil prose for oh so violet prose until Cecil either gives up or blushes all the way to his ears. Cecil shifts in his arms.

 

“I think I’m going to stand by my original philosophy that things become perfect when you accept them and love them for what they are, and I love everything about you, including that gap in your front teeth you hate so much that you really shouldn’t get rid of,” Cecil answers, and Carlos snorts. It’s going to take a long, long time before he lets Cecil live down the look of horror he gave when Carlos mentioned Invisalign. “But I’ll help you change, if that makes you happier. Because it’s not really perfect if you walk around hating yourself all the time.”

 

“Why didn’t you say anything if you knew?”

 

“Because I figured you’d tell me when you were ready. Can we go to sleep? I have to be to the studio by seven tomorrow for a staff meeting and I’m--” Cecil interrupts himself with a gigantic yawn, and Carlos smiles.

 

“Yeah,” he agrees, and kisses Cecil’s forehead. “Thanks for looking out for me.”

 

“Always,” Cecil agrees, and curls up with his head on Carlos’ chest, eyes fluttering shut. Carlos jumps.

 

“Hey--”

 

Cecil’s eyes fly open, alarmed, and he darts a look around the room before it settles on Carlos’ face--somewhere around Carlos’ chin instead of his eyes, but Cecil’s glasses are off and the room is lit by nothing but the lamps in the courtyard a storey below, so Carlos is willing to give him the proverbial A for effort. “What?”

 

Carlos looks down at the hand Cecil’s still holding, the eyes staring uncertainly at his face like he might have just spotted something ready to eat them alive, the complete lack of space between their bodies where Cecil’s already made himself comfortable like--

 

_\--like he didn’t even need to wrap his head around it._

 

Carlos smiles and shakes his head.

 

“Nothing,” he says, and this time he tugs Cecil’s hand instead of the other way around, pulls him back down. “Good night, Cecil.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> You actually got here? You wanna see my rambly headcanons and reblogs and shit? Hit me up at prismatic-bell.tumblr.com.


End file.
